A method and a corresponding device for shaping and cooling a flowable food mass, in particular hot melted cheese, is known from DE 103 28 905, for example. Therein, the food mass is shaped into a product band by means of two cooling belts guided by shaping rollers and is cooled during further transport. Shaping the hot product into a wide band having an adjustable and homogeneous thickness is a technical challenge in particular, since the melted cheese must first have a temperature of over 80° C. in order to be formable. Within the scope of further processing, cooling must be carried out rapidly and, primarily, homogeneously, without the product band becoming deformed. After cooling, the product band is initially cut into strips, which are placed on top of one another, and are cut, via transverse cutting, into stacks of cheese slices lying on top of one another. The finished stacks are packaged “slice-on-slice”.
This type of production makes it possible to produce cheese slices in mass quantities and to package these cheese slices in relatively large bundles. This type of packaging is only suitable, however, for types of cheese in which the consistency of the slices is such that they have a certain tearing resistance and can be easily lifted off of one another even in the stacked state. Types of cheese having a particularly creamy and soft consistency are suitable for production in this manner only in certain ways and, primarily, being stacked on top of one another in slices without placement of a separating sheet therebetween.
The use of a separating film in such a method is described in the subsequently published document DE 10 2011 103 826. Therein, a method for shaping and cooling initially hot and therefore flowable melted cheese is described, which is applied onto a moving metallic cooling belt via a supply nozzle. In this case, a shaping roller acting upon the cooling belt is used to shape individual shaped bodies, in particular finished shaped slices, from the melted cheese, to release these shaped bodies from the molding cavities of the shaping roller and leave these on the moving cooling belt to cool. A carrier film that holds the shaped bodies together is required in order to process these individual shaped bodies. At the end of the cooling process, the film is cut and can be used as intermediate film during stacking. In this method, the separating sheets are therefore already provided during the shaping of the food mass and are cut, along with the product lying thereon, into corresponding slices. A separating film between the cheese band and a conveyor belt is also disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,7435,817.
It has proven to be difficult, however, to cut a cheese band, which is lying on a film, together with the film into exact strips without the product being changed thereby.
The problem addressed by the invention is therefore that of improving the known method for processing flowable food masses such that a particularly soft and creamy food product can also be brought into slice form, in mass quantities, and stacked to form stacks of slices.
The problem addressed by the invention is solved by the method and the device according to the present invention.